Installing the Holley Dominator EFI - All Wired Up!

The School of Automotive Machinists shows you how to wire up a race car the right way

It's one thing to prematurely load your car up on the trailer because it melted a piston or snapped an input shaft in half, but it's an entirely different exercise in uber-lameness when an electrical gremlin cuts your race weekend short. No one wants to be the goofball racer scratching his head in the pits, who thinks his ignition system or nitrous solenoid took a dump, when the real culprit is faulty wiring. Making matters exponentially worse is if that goofball racer wasn't so lazy in the first place, he would have taken the time to wire his car up right the first time. Since magazine writers pretending to be racers are goofballs by nature, we turned to the real pros at the School of Automotive Machinists to get GMHTP's '95 Camaro drag car wired up as cleanly as an FBI informant.

One of the great perks about wiring up a race car is that you're essentially starting with a clean slate. Wiring a street/strip machine requires sifting through factory schematics and diagrams trying to figure out silly things like which accessories go to which wire, searching for keyed ignition sources, determining which wires can be eliminated, and accidently cracking old and brittle factory wires like raw spaghetti sticks. However, since race cars only require the bare essentials—such as cooling fans, electric water pumps, starter switches, and accessory activation buttons—you can rip out every last piece of miserable factory wiring and start from scratch. That's exactly what SAM technician Dustin Rush did with our Camaro, and after watching the man work for a few afternoons, it was obvious that he's wired up quite a few race cars in his day. Thanks to the SAM crew, The Purp is now one step closer to rolling under its own power, and electrical issues will be the last thing on our minds when it's time to hit the dragstrip.

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1 The Purp’s factory PCM and wiring harness got sent to the landfill many moons ago. Since a 451ci LS small-block occupies the space where a wheezy 3.4L V-6 once lived, we ordered up a Holley Dominator standalone engine management system (PN 554-114). The self-learning Dominator system includes a plethora of bells and whistles that are optional on competing systems, such as the ability to run up to 24 fuel injectors, a progressive nitrous control, a boost controller, a water injection controller, an integrated data acquisition system, and dual-channel wideband Oxygen sensor compatibility.